TV sports great Dick Enberg shined when ceding spotlight to others

It was second-and-20 in the first series of the second half with the Bears already up 23-3 when Otis Wilson, Dan Hampton and Richard Dent blew past the Patriots offensive line.

“Here they come, a jailbreak,” NBC’s Dick Enberg said as Wilson and Hampton closed in on quarterback Steve Grogan, Wilson credited with the sack for a loss of 13, dropping Grogan on his 10. “If this were a fight, they’d have to stop it.”

With that, Enberg neatly summarized a Super Bowl XX rout in which the Bears would open a 41-point lead in the third quarter. The 46-10 shuffling of the Pats almost 32 years ago earned what remains the only Lombardi Trophy at Halas Hall.

While associated with the catchphrase “Oh, my!” — emblematic of the enthusiasm he seemed to bring to every assignment — as well the essays he crafted to close the annual tennis championships at Wimbledon and other major sports events, Enberg, who died Thursday in California of an apparent heart attack at 82, was truly at his best reacting in the moment.

Enberg wasn’t flashy. He never overwhelmed the events he covered and rarely left fingerprints on a broadcast. He was an excellent reporter with a keen eye, a sense of humor and whimsy and a rarely equaled ability to distill what unfolded before him in an unadorned manner.

Peak Enberg was when he simply was calling the action, often ceding the spotlight to colleagues such as Merlin Olsen on football and Al McGuire and Billy Packer on college basketball or to the events and athletes they described.

These included the 1979 Final Four, in which Mark Aguirre and DePaul lost to Indiana State, setting up a title matchup of Larry Bird versus Magic Johnson and Michigan State (which Enberg also called for NBC) in what remains the highest-rated college basketball game ever.

Ditto on CBS when Illinois earned a 2005 Final Four berth with an overtime victory over Arizona in Rosemont.

The ease with which Enberg seemed to do all of this belied the onetime professor’s dedication to preparation and the skills accumulated in a broadcasting career that spanned parts of seven decades and, it seemed, almost every sport.

His network work included calling eight Super Bowls while pregame host for another, as well as announcing six NCAA basketball title games, nine Rose Bowls, 28 Wimbledon tournaments, part of one World Series, some NBA basketball and three Olympics, plus hosting seven Breeders’ Cup horse racing broadcasts.

Enberg also called play-by-play for the syndicated TVS ad-hoc network when Notre Dame upended visiting UCLA in 1974 to end the Bruins’ 88-game winning streak and in 1968 when an earlier Bruins winning streak ended at 47 with a loss to unbeaten Houston in a prime-time spectacle at the Astrodome.

The latter, featuring Houston’s Elvin Hayes and the John Wooden-coached Bruins led by Kareem-Abdul Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor), was put together by future White Sox part-owner and vice chairman Eddie Einhorn. It established there was a national TV audience interested in college basketball.

“That was the platform from which college basketball's popularity was sent into the stratosphere,” Enberg told USA Today last year. “The ’79 game, the Magic-Bird game, everyone wants to credit that as the greatest game of all time. That was just the booster rocket that sent it even higher.”

In Southern California, where greats such as the Dodgers’ Vin Scully, the Lakers’ Chick Hearn and the Kings’ Bob Miller were setting a very high bar, Enberg held his own over the years as the local voice of UCLA basketball (a nine-year run that included eight national championship teams), the Rams, the Angels and most recently the Padres, the job from which he retired last year.

Enberg got his start in broadcasting humbly. After applying for a job sweeping up at a local radio station, he was hired as a weekend disc jockey for $1 an hour while an undergraduate at Central Michigan.

Working toward his master’s degree and doctorate in health science studies at Indiana in 1957 at age 22, he began announcing football and basketball on radio for $35 a game. That’s the equivalent of $305 today.

Enberg accepted a teaching position at what’s now Cal State Northridge — and served as assistant baseball coach — in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley but soon realized he needed to supplement his pay with sportscasting work.

Eventually he left the classroom behind but would take a teacher’s interest in promising young people. To media newcomers, he was generous with time, advice and encouragement.

As with his broadcasts, he almost always was smiling. Even unseen, one sensed it in his voice.

Enberg, however, was stoic on the day in 1988 when he learned while at Wimbledon that NBC had lost the rights to the Rose Bowl to ABC. The New Year’s Day game then was still annually a matchup of the Big Ten and Pac-10 champions. He was philosophical about his bosses being outbid, but there was no smile.

To someone who grew up in Michigan and California, as Enberg did, the Rose Bowl meant a great deal. Yet he understood and accepted the situation.

He likely had the same reaction a few years earlier, when, after sharing 1982 World Series announcing duties with Joe Garagiola for NBC, the network hired Scully as its lead baseball announcer and World Series play-by-play man.

The move made sense. Scully arguably was the best baseball announcer of all time, though Enberg also is a winner of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting. But Enberg’s favorite sport was always baseball.

Being in LA, Enberg scored cameos in films such as “Heaven Can Wait” and “The Naked Gun.” He also hosted a few game shows, the syndicated “Sports Challenge” being the best of them.

What no one ever would mistake him for, however, is a singer. Despite his preparation, he once famously ran out of things to talk about during a Wooden-era UCLA basketball blowout.

With the Bruins going into an early stall against Oregon on a rainy night in 1970 at Pauley Pavilion, Enberg was struggling to burn off the clock himself and wound up humming the tune “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from the film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” He didn’t know the words.

This struck a chord with Bruins fans, and Enberg was coaxed to agree to perform the song at center court if UCLA clinched the conference title. Every time Wooden’s squad opened a big lead after that, the UCLA band would play “Raindrops.”

When the Bruins sewed up the championship, Enberg had to follow through. He missed a lot of notes but connected with fans, many of whom opened umbrellas as he sang.